Term of the Moment
engineer
Definition: storage capacity
The amount of data a hard drive, solid state drive (SSD), USB drive, optical disc or magnetic tape cartridge can hold. Storage capacity is measured in gigabytes (GB) and terabytes (TB). Decades ago, megabytes (MB) were the common metric for all storage devices, although USB drives today are still made with less than one gigabyte. See space/time, hard disk, SSD, USB drive, magnetic tape and optical disc.
A Storage Forecast in 1995
Photonics was expected to make a huge impact by 2005; witness this article from PC Magazine in 1995. Although this has yet to materialize, today's PCs have long exceeded these storage and RAM projections. When multicore CPUs are accounted for, clock speeds have also been surpassed.